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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26622943">like the love of comfort</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/Neko-no-Tsuki'>Neko-no-Tsuki (LunaKat)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Internal Conflict, Loneliness, Pre-Canon, Self-Doubt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 06:34:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,520</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26622943</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/Neko-no-Tsuki</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>For Inuyasha Sins Week. Day 4: Greed.</p><p>The idea that you should just be content with what you are, who you are, what you have, only works if it’s worth being content about.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>InuYasha/Kikyou (InuYasha)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Inuyasha Sins Week 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>like the love of comfort</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><em>“Greed, <strong>like the love of comfort</strong>, is a kind of fear.”</em><br/>—Cyril Connolly</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Wanting what you can’t have is a sin. It’s that simple.</p><p>Inuyasha wants to know who decided that—who came up with the idea that <em>wanting</em> is something to be condemned. It can’t be so strange to want something within your reach. The idea that it could be unnatural, could be damnable, just doesn’t sit right with him. If you want to feel something, you have to reach out and touch it. If you want to drink, you have to cup water in your palms and bring it to your mouth. If you want to eat, you have to do so consciously, because no one is going to shove food down your throat.</p><p>Wanting is just so... instinctive. The idea that you should just be content with what you are, who you are, what you have, only works if it’s worth being content about. All he has is bitterness and brokenness, is empty spaces that ache when he thinks about them for too long.</p><p>There’s no way he can be expected not to want more. To dream of more. It is not as though the things he wants are unreasonable requests. They can’t be. To hope for more, for something better—that’s just human nature.</p><p>Human.</p><p>
  <em>If you became human, we could be with one another.</em>
</p><p>Maybe it’s the wanting of the impossible that’s the real sin. The wanting of the unattainable. Wanting things that can’t be, that can never be.</p><p>But is it really so unattainable? Inuyasha has been human before. Has become human, and stayed that way for a whole night once every month. So perhaps it’s not such a stretch to imagine that such a thing could be extended into permanence, that he could sink into his mother’s blood and never come back out.</p><p>Kikyo seems to think it’s possible. She’s wiser than he is, seems more versed in what is and isn’t possible. Seems to understand the unspoken rules that can’t be broken, but also how to toe the line without crossing it. Or how to bend the boundaries until there’s just enough room to slip passed, unnoticed by that omnipotent decision-maker who deems whether or not your desires are worthy of damnation.</p><p>Besides, there is a difference between wanting what <em>can’t</em> be and wanting what can <em>never</em> be. Isn’t there? <em>Can’t</em> is a fleeting thing, a slippery refusal, a flimsy word that only refers to the right now. <em>Never</em> is more permanent, more impossible, rings with a deafening finality.</p><p>And he’s been human already. So it can’t be <em>never</em>.</p><p>Becoming a full youkai, by extension, seems more like a <em>never</em>. He has never known what it means for his blood to run so pure, so powerfully through his veins, to brim over with enough might that nature itself quivers around him. In his lifetime, he’s never known what it means to climb higher than he is, to ascend up the metaphorical ladder until he can look down at the world from this brilliant peak and marvel at the dizzying path of his ascent.</p><p>Instead, he slumps lower into himself, sinks to the bottom of the food chain, quivers in the shadows with bated breath while counting the seconds until the sun rises. Until he can rise with it, climb back to his proper place of an uncertain middle ground, a confusing pocket and a position that no one would envy. Sure, it’s a far cry from frail mortality, but—it isn’t progress, really, when you’re just stumbling your way back to where you started. You can’t call where you are a zenith when you know there’s something more sitting above you, and you’re too exhausted to reach it because you have to constantly claw your way out from someplace lower.</p><p>Is it lower, though?</p><p>If humans are lower, then why is it that Kikyo is offering him the entire world in exchange for forgoing his perch? She’s standing at the same bottom that he always despises, with open arms spread wide and waiting, wanting just as hard as he is. Willing to grant him everything he never even thought about, never even thought was worth wanting.</p><p>To be together. To never be lonely again. To have a place to live, a place to be loved. A home. A wife. A family. A <em>life</em>.</p><p>Peace.</p><p>Such a thing can’t be an impossible want, an unattainable thing. So many people can find it, can settle in their lives without feeling restlessness stir within them. They are content because they got what they wanted, and they don’t need anything more. And they didn’t need to tear themselves open in the process, break themselves against a cruel world that would be content to split them down the middle and divide them into halves and then curse both sides like they could help how they were born.</p><p>Maybe it’s just an impossible want for him, then. Because he is what he is. There’s no way a creature born from an unnatural union can conceivably earn what normal people already have.</p><p>But if he were normal too. If he were human too. Then maybe...</p><p>This isn’t what he thought he would be thinking about, when he heard whispers of the Shikon-no-Tama on an enemy’s lips. Some weaker youkai that thought it was a good idea to pick a fight with a half-breed. A creature desperate for power that sought a gemstone capable of bending reality to your will. Make the unattainable attainable, the impossible possible.</p><p>Ironically, he had been so disgusted by the enraptured glow in its eyes that he killed it, just to put it out of its misery.</p><p>Ironically, he ended up pursuing the very thing it was so bent on, and became just as enraptured.</p><p>If he became like that—desperate and power-hungry and delirious over the Jewel—then wouldn’t that be considered lowering himself, too?</p><p>But he found a different treasure. He found Kikyo, with her soft sympathy behind a frosty façade. He found someone he thinks he could almost call a friend, and maybe more if he had the luxury. He found an opportunity to fulfill a different wish, one where he doesn’t need power in order to get what he wants.</p><p>This is probably a better opportunity than he even deserves. Wanting can’t be considered a sin when you’re sacrificing something to attain it. It can’t be wrong to trade something you’ve never really wanted for something you never realized you longed for.</p><p>It seems like an obvious choice. So why is he hesitating?</p><p>The idea of being human... <em>permanently</em>—it makes his stomach clench to think about. It shouldn’t, because nothing good has ever come from being hanyou anyway, but it does. He’s spent so long associating his human form with fear that now...</p><p>No. No, he can’t think like that. This is the best offer he’s going to get, and probably better than he deserves. He’d be an idiot not to take it.</p><p>
  <em>Tomorrow, at dawn, I’ll bring the Jewel to the clearing.</em>
</p><p>Kikyo’s eyes had been so steady, so calm. She hadn’t wavered in the slightest when she proposed the idea, as though it weren’t anywhere near the realm of impossibility like it should be. Like the idea of him attaining everything he never knew he wanted wasn’t something that the world would cruelly deny him, just when he was starting to remember how hope felt when it warmed his chest. Like it was something <em>worth</em> wanting.</p><p>And he isn’t the only one wanting, either. She wants the same thing, the prospect of someone by her side and a peaceful life free of fighting. To have a home where someone you love is waiting for you at the end of the day. And she wants that with <em>him</em>.</p><p>It’s not just him wanting the impossible, and taking it anyway, breaking that unspoken rule that separates sin from sacrament. Doing this would be as much an act of giving as it is of taking. And wanting surely it can’t be a sin, if doing so benefits more than just yourself. Because if he climbs down from his perch, sinks to the bottom and stays there, it wouldn’t be the same as sitting there alone—she’ll be there to break his fall, to stand hand-in-hand with him. And if that isn’t something worth wanting, then he doesn’t what is.</p><p>
  <em>I’ll wait for you, Inuyasha.</em>
</p><p>Hell, she’s already there, reaching out for him, waiting for him to link hands with her. She’s ready to wrap him up in everything they both never thought possible, both never they knew they wanted. She’s waiting to forge a whole world in the space between their arms. That’s more than he could ever hope for.</p><p>Nothing better is going to come along any time soon. And waiting too long might cost him his only chance at happiness. Hesitating now would be stupid.</p><p>A home, a peaceful life, someone by his side. If wanting that is a sin, then fine.</p><p>It’ll be worth it, in the end.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I like InuKik more as a tragic backstory element than as an actual relationship, if that makes sense.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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